The BBC turned a summer day of its Radio 4 programming into art (via Brendan Dawes).

Like many of you, perhaps, I’ve never completely forgiven Google for killing off Google Reader, its excellent standards-setting RSS reader.

After flirting with commercial competition, like Feedly, for a time, I finally settled on a self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS (along with its companion mobile app) as a serviceable replacement.

It is really only possible to love Tiny Tiny RSS in the way that one would love a Lada: one respects its fortitude, appreciates that it gets you were you need to go, and admires that it comes with a toolkit in the trunk. But the love is necessarily capped, and one hopes that, eventually, one might trade in the Lada for something slightly jazzier.

That something, in the case of Tiny Tiny RSS, might be FreshRSS, a new self-hostable RSS reader from Framasoft. I installed it this evening, and it is, indeed, beautiful, capable and jazzy. The requirements for running it are modest: a relatively modern LAMP server. There’s no mobile app required as the design is pleasantly responsive, and works equally well on desktop and mobile.

Framasoft is “people working together with the same desire: promote digital freedoms.” In FreshRSS it appears to be doing just that.

I’ll report back after a few weeks of using FreshRSS as to how it performs as my daily RSS driver.

The Adirondack chair doesn’t quite follow physical laws, but that yellow, oh my. A recent refill of the yellow half-pan in my watercolour set from an art supply shop in Amsterdam.

I’m still waiting for the job of making me a window here in my subterranean office to rise to the top of the to-do list, so unless there’s a hurricane going on, I have no way of knowing what the weather is like outside.

As a proxy for this I can connect to the “live view” of my Ring Video Doorbell, across the street. It’s fuzzy, but clear enough to let me know if I need an umbrella or not.

Although the races for the New York 25th congressional seat and for New York Senate are not expected to be close (Kirsten Gillibrand is given a 99.9% chance of winning for the Democrats in the Senate), I am, like many, particularly motivated to vote in the US midterm elections this year.

So I filled in my absentee ballot this morning, well in advance of the deadline, and it’s going out in the mail today, complete with a beaver stamp, as befits a dual national.

I got to know George Guimond many years ago, both through his work as an architect here in Charlottetown and by virtue of his family being neighbours, in a country sense, when we lived out on the Kingston Road in the mid-1990s.

George retired from architecture some years ago, he and his wife Sherrill moved to Forest City, New Brunswick, and George found a second career as a woodworker:

After working 30 years as an architect, it came time for a change. A few years ago a work colleague loaned me a copy of  the book, “The Soul of a Tree” by George Nakashima and I immediately knew that  fine woodworking would become my new career.  The interest in wood follows a tradition of woodworkers with both my father and grand father being accomplished  woodworkers. I now see those years of experience as a design architect have served as a training ground for designing my original pieces. The furniture is constructed using traditional joinery and assembly, using solid woods, something not found in today’s mass produced furniture. Joinery includes hand cut dovetails, finger joints, mortise and tenon, wedged through tenons, etc…

You can see samples of his work on his Applewood Studio website.

“A dual purpose cabinet, a stair for a loved pet and storage cubbies,” by George Guimond.

I’ve been going through my back issues of Whole Earth Review lately; I’d forgotten what a healthy classified section the magazine had, and that you needed to be a subscriber to place an ad, which seems an excellent idea.

I have known Catherine Hennessey for 25 years, and I’ve always delighted in the numerical twist that unites us: she was born in 1933, I was born in 1966. So when I turned 33, she turned 66; when I turned 44, she turned 77.

And so when I turn 66, she will turn 99.

This year Catherine turned 85, and I wanted to make something to mark the occasion, so I combined my love of letterpress with my newfound love of bookbinding and made the guest book for her birthday party.

The covers are heavy green Saint Armand paper covered book board. I printed Catherine’s name on the front cover before affixing the paper to the book board. It’s set in 30 point Futura Bold. For the endpapers I used orange Japanese paper from a pack I purchased in Halifax in March from The Ikebana Shop.

The inside signatures are of cream-coloured Saint Armand tag paper which was a joy to work with: more a living thing than something manufactured. I printed Catherine’s name at the top of each page, along with her birthday date, in a casual script that Sarah Saunders left a font of on my doorstep one day several years ago.

I bound the cover and signatures together using a coptic stitch, something well-suited to a book that’s meant to lay open flat. My stitching needs work, as it’s something completely new to me, but it did the job and held everything together: as I wrote to Catherine in my colophon at the back, “the book feels like it’s improbably held together, but, somehow, it stays bound–like Ms. Hennessey.”

I was very happy to see the book well-used on the evening of Catherine’s party.

The Cadre published a store last week on the impending application of Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy (FOIPP) legislation to the University of Prince Edward Island, Taking Care of Our Own: What the Amended FOIPP Legislation Holds for UPEI.

From the newspaper’s reporting I learned that my own access request (detailed in my post I Paid $166 for Data about Parked Cars) was one of only 8 requests received so far under the university’s existing self-managed access system.

I’m hopeful that a simpler, unified regime for access will lower barriers and encourage others to take advantage of this powerful capability.

The impact of mailing a letter (photo taken 9 years ago at the postal museum in Copenhagen).